It is no secret that studying can be challenging: browsing through endless textbook pages, taking notes and highlighting half of the page with a yellow sharpie.“Sometimes studying is boring, just deal with it” is what students are taught to accept as an inevitable rule. But does studying actually have to be boring?

Currently, around 15-20% of the world’s population lives with some form of disability. This is the case while most websites and software products are not accessible, making it difficult or even impossible for many people to use.

Web is an essential part of daily life for a lot of people and it is crucial to remove barriers that prevent interaction with or access to websites and software products. One example of accessibility is adding alternative texts to images (alt text). Adding alt texts to photos allows visually impaired users to get access to the image information using screen readers. There is even a business case here since in addition to accessibility, adding alternative texts will greatly help with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as it provides better image descriptions, helping search engine crawlers to index an image properly. Continue reading ActiveTextbook on The Path of Becoming Fully Accessible

We are excited to announce that we are going to be exhibiting at the World Conference On Online Learning, the 27th edition of the International Council for Open and Distance Education (ICDE) World Conference.

The conference takes place at the Sheraton Centre in Toronto with the theme of Teaching in The Digital Age – Re-Thinking Teaching and Learning. We will be at the conference from October 16th to 19th. If you are attending this event, stop by our booth (#41) and find out how ActiveTextbook is changing the eLearning experience and supporting open and flexible learning. Continue reading We Are Exhibiting At The World Conference On Online Learning (ICDE 2017)!

According to the Horizon Report, 2017 Higher Education Edition, the next-generation Learning Management Systems (LMS) are virtual learning spaces that support personalization, meet universal design standards, play a large role in formative learning assessment, and are more flexible than traditional LMS. A market study done by Technavio, a leading global technology research and advisory company, suggests that the global next generation LMS market is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of more than 26% during 2016-2020. Continue reading Next-Generation Learning Management Systems (LMS)

I’d like to discuss a topic that’s not directly relevant to end users but is very important to businesses hosting and maintaining ActiveTextbook. Specifically, I’ll be talking about hosting and updating ActiveTextbook server software with Docker containers.

Docker is a containerization technology that has taken off in the last few years. The original ground work was laid by Google, but popularized by Docker Inc in 2013. Containerization is a standard way to package server side applications. Packaging all applications in the same manner allows for a efficient workflows and numerous other benefits: Continue reading ActiveTextbook with Docker Containers

Welcome to the “Creating Groups in ActiveTextbook” blog. We are going to show you step by step how to create Contacts and Groups in ActiveTextbook, and how to assign a book to Groups.

Groups

A Group is a list of individual users that can be addressed in a single action, such as granting and revoking access to Books or sending messages. For example, you can setup a Group to represent a class. Each Group has an Owner – an individual user that created the Group and controls access to it. Accounts that are operating under Publisher roles are allowed to create Groups in ActiveTextbook PRO. Read more…